Sermon Preview – Week of September 18

The preaching text for Sunday will be John 5:18-30. These verses unfold the heart of what John is doing in this chapter. He is introducing us to the reason the Jewish religious leaders oppose Jesus to the point of having him executed. However, John is also reinforcing the point of this entire gospel account, that is, Jesus is the Son of God and those who truly believe that find eternal life in him. John chapter five is a collision between the Jewish religious leaders, whose hope rests in their system of worship and Jesus, who claims to be the Son of God, the singular source of hope of mankind before God. Jesus has healed a disabled man on the Sabbath and commanded him to get up, take his mat and go. The religious leaders accuse him of breaking the Sabbath, when all he’s done is break their version of the Sabbath not God’s. Jesus won’t remain silent in the face of this accusation, so he says, and I’ll paraphrase, “God remains at work on the Sabbath, and if God isn’t breaking the Sabbath then neither am I”. The long and the short of Jesus’ defense claim is that he is God, and all that they see him doing is the work of God, everything that they hear him saying are the words of God. Jesus is saying, “I am God”! This is the claim that we will look more closely at this coming Lord’s Day. Jesus will explain more fully what he means, and why it is exactly he can make this claim. He will also be very clear on what it means for anyone who hears and believes, or hears and rejects. May we see, believe and know Jesus Christ for who he declares himself to be!